Not a bad win at all but probably a bit uglier than some expected. Still it’s early in the season…

Carolina’s bench is so deep, almost to a detrimental effect. This team should be even better once the rotation tightens up.

Joel Berry does look like the sleeper among the freshmen. Only knock on him is his unorthodox shot. Paging Hubert Davis…

Joel James was 100% for the entire game. That will probably never ever happen again.

Ugh. Forgot about the foul shooting. That’s apparently going to be a holdover from last year.

Commentators spent about 40% of the game talking about Dook. It was just like when Dickie V was there.

The 3-point shooting, as we all suspected, also appears to be a major problem. So far at least, it doesn’t look like the freshmen are going to be our saviors in that area. But maybe give them a few months…

Still not quite sure what Isaiah Hicks’ game is. Everyone keeps talking about how much more comfortable he is playing down low, but what’s his go-to move down there?

Kennedy Meeks with a very McAdoo-like steal and lay-up. Nice!

Seems like we’re in for an entire year of the commentators talking about the academic scandal throughout the game. Glad Fran Fraschilla could weigh in and claim every student who took an AFAM class now has a worthless diploma. Can’t wait for the commentator during Sunday’s game to talk about how the university should be shut down and razed for condos.

With the regular season about to start, we look back at the preseason beatdown against…well, it was some opponent. It hardly mattered. We also assess the freshman, and try and figure out what the two keys to the season might be. And yes, we’ll discuss the scandal. Tell my mom to stop emailing me. In Duke Sucks, we look at how Coach K is now an expert on US foreign policy and ISIS. Email us at thbthd@gmail.com

Here’s an interview with AD Bubba Cunningham on this morning’s Dan Patrick show. Dan asks all the right questions, and Bubba’s answers are sort of what you expect, although I’m not sure anyone ever does themselves favors by speaking so politically correctly, like a sanitized PR robot. It always comes off as a bit hollow, even if the content of the answers is correct. You’re not running for city alderman, Bubba. Speak like a human being.
And Patrick asks at one point, “Does this happen everywhere?” Bubba completely deflects the question, when he should have said, “It probably does. Athletes on every campus know which classes to take if they’re looking to slack off. If you want to work hard in college, you’ll work hard. If you don’t, you’ll find ways around it. That’s true for athletes, as well as regular students. The difference between other schools and UNC is that at UNC, there were faculty and an administrator involved in helping students skate. That was a ridiculous breach that someone should have shut down years ago.”

You’ve probably read at least a summary of the findings by Kenneth Wainstein after a multi-month investigation, but if not, here you go.

There doesn’t seem to be all that much new here. The mechanics of the fraud are a bit more clear now, and some new names (at least to me) have been added to the record. But the whole scandal still seems pretty straightforward. The head of the AFAM department allowed easy classes and independent study courses to be created in order to help those students that might struggle otherwise. In some cases, academic advisers helped steer athletes to these courses.

Here are a few more relevant tidbits.

Wainstein and his team of lawyers did not find any evidence that coaches or other athletic officials hatched the scheme, nor did they find any kind of financial incentive. But they concluded that pressure from the tutoring program in the early 1990s prompted Crowder to create the classes.

Then there’s also this:

But word got out about the classes and eventually hundreds of fraternity members, and some sorority members, were lining up for them.

As for the rationale behind all this…

Nyang’oro said he allowed Crowder to create the classes, and later created some after she retired, because he also thought student athletes were in a difficult position. He said early in his career he had seen what had happened to two athletes who flunked out: One was murdered in his rural hometown; the other ended up in jail.

So here’s hoping this report puts an end to this whole mess. The report also mentions that Roy Williams wondered whether it was OK for Rashad McCants to be taking so many independent study classes. After he made that comment, the practice was tightened somewhat.

The report also seems to suggest that the practice was confined to the AFAM department under a couple people. What happened to that independent study class on submarines are whatever Tyler Hansbrough was supposedly taking?

The USA Today/Coaches Poll has the Heels just outside the top 5. Kentucky grabs the top spot, a team UNC will play this season. Other Carolina opponents in the top 10 alone include Duke, Louisville and UVA. The Heels could potentially match up against #4 Wisconsin. It might be easier to just list the top teams UNC won’t be playing.

After the summer break, we’re back to run down the few Tar Heel tidbits that made news over the last couple months. We’ve also got a look at the just-released schedule. Kentucky? Duke? Louisville? How bad is it for Carolina?

And in Dook Sucks, we shine the spotlight on the most unlikely member of Team USA – a guy who doesn’t even start on his own team. Whuh?

Yep, it’s that time again. The schedule for the upcoming season has been released. As was the case with the past few years, it looks like a beast. And that’s mostly because of how stacked the ACC is. Louisville. Syracuse. Dook. Pittsburgh. Which is not to say the pre-conference schedule will be easy. It won’t. There’s yet another game against Kentucky in there. But at least UNC won’t be facing the top team in the Big 10/ACC challenge this year. We get Iowa.
You can view the complete schedule here.